[tech-cord] email access for students

[George Tuttle]

I hope whoever was trying to unsubscribe got it done before they receive this epistle.     I did have my pencils and paper taken away for several days while attending 4th grade at the Ware Consolidated School.  All the boys,( I believe there were 5 of us), had them taken away because someone was writing nasty notes to one of the girls in our class.  Obviously, it had to be one of the boys!  Guess what?  The notes continued until the girls lost their pencils too!  Then the teacher got the brilliant idea of giving each of us a different color of pencil.  I got a bright yellow that I could hardly read.     I was absent one day and the next day I faced the Inquisition!!  This girl had received a nasty note with MY color.  I was standing in front of god who was Mr. Macintosh, the superintendent and principal and the guy who handed out spankings.  I was petrified!  He had the fairness to ask me if I did it.  I said 'No, because I was gone yesterday.'  At which time, my teacher apologized and felt bad about the false accusation and we all got our pencils and paper back.  I was somewhat of a local hero, for about a half-hour.  The teacher thought that we should use our newly acquired paper and pencils to do an extra long math assignment.     There is a moral to the story above.  It doesn't matter what the technology, there will always be abuses and someone will always try to fix the system, sometimes successfully, sometimes not.  That's the nature of the beast.      Its nice to ask your peers what they're doing but job security requires finding out what the community wants.  In our case,  the school board made the call on email access for students.  Their wishes should reflect the wishes of the people they represent.  No parent has asked for email access for their child.  Special allowances have been made for staff members that wanted their students to use email for a particular purpose.  When its a part of the curriculum, its allowed.     Computer usage has become so ingrained into our curriculum that over 300 computers on line is not enough.  Like someone else said, if I give casual usage of email to all students, it will detract from the time for other usages.  I might feel differently if I had a bunch of computers available for the casual usage.  I still don't think that would change the community's opinion.     As Carroll said, some of us have heard this email discussion many times before.  It still boils down to what your community wants and not what we want.  Personally, I think that we should teach all students on how to properly stand guard duty but I don't think that will happen.  Also, there should be a required course for tech coordinators and superintendents on how to find surplus property!  That probably won't happen either.     I hope this email brings at least a slight smile to everybody during this, the ugliest week in Iowa education.   George